Finally ran my one-shot of the game for a group of players, most new to roleplaying, almost all new to PbtA, and notably, entirely trans women! (Some technological snarls forced us to push play back one week, sorry for the delay.) I deliberately invited way too many players because I know folks tend to drop out, and sure enough, we went from having all of the Playbooks claimed to just having four players.
Setting creation was a lot of fun: I decided that the Shadow turns men into mute savages, losing their voices over time and acting increasingly violent, while women become inanimate statues of black glass that they blindly pay worship to. The players really surprised me with some of their stuff, given how new most of them were to the hobby; it was decided that Clan Molthas had once tried to unify the Clanlands by force and then chose self-exile in the mountains once they came to regret it, and Clan Richti were famed navigators who mapped the stars and have a magical constellation map that moves with the night sky. Both of those jumped out at me as super cool. Clan Sharn notably possessed the largest supply of untainted water left in the Clanlands, which the others resent them for.
Our squad wound up having a Lionness (Liasa, the commanding officer of the crew, a trans woman out of Clan Dotha), a Fox (Yavni, a Richti trans woman experienced in this fight already), a Raven (Sabal, an intersex non-binary woman from Clan Molthas and the freshest recruit of the bunch), and a Spider (Kel, an older Sharn cis woman with burns all over her body and a cruel wit), with the other player unable to make it. Yavni and Sabal wound up stealing the show, with an early religious argument and a couple narrow rescues from certain death giving them a tumultuous battlefield friendship.
Their mission was to rescue an influential elder woman, Lati, from a village left behind the front when the Shadow made their most recent push. Lots of Complications were rolled in our Mission Moves; Sabal wound up pretty heinously wounded and panicked, the elder was rescued (in a pretty dramatic strike on a ruined cathedral) only to have her turn into a dust devil made up of obsidian shards that very nearly killed Sabal on the route home before vanishing off to surely menace the Watch another day. Our squad returned to base with their target not only not alive and safe, but now an active threat, and we had some vignettes to show how little hope the traditionalists back home believed in them and their fight.
We had a little trouble with the structure of the Moves, feeling that the Mission Moves especially were a little counter-intuitive and that they wanted more actual Moves to do while on the mission going from scene to scene; while I think a part of this is inexperience with the engine, there was a fair bit more of “what can I do?” than I expected, and the game wound up really having nothing other than Rely On Your Training rolls once the Mission Moves were done, which made other stats feel less useful. It was also a little tough to feel out the difference for me (as MC) to deal out Weary marks instead of Jaded, but I feel like I did an okay job winging it.
Overall, the ride was a little bumpier than I think any of us would’ve liked, but we had a lot of fun, the players came away despite the warts really enjoying PbtA, and I get the satisfaction of knowing The Watch has now had at least one entirely-trans group of players take a shot at it.
The full book will have examples of how to run the mission sections – I had trouble grocking that too.
That’s a great write up, thank you Lex!
When your players were asking ‘what can I do?’, was it in relation to which move can they do, or more generic than that?
Also, you don’t hand out jaded, only weariness. Jaded comes from missions and player choices on moves.
Great stuff, though. Those backgrounds are stellar!